What will the Women’s Council be watching for in the 2020 speech from the throne?
There are a number of issues that we hope to see action on — and many are longstanding issues that have been exacerbated by COVID-19. They include:
- women’s economic security (including social assistance, the minimum wage, and pay equity);
- caring work (home care and child care);
- access to health care (including mental health, sexual and reproductive health care, and LGBTQIA2+ care);
- violence (with a particular focus on sexual violence);
- engagement of and support for community-based organizations; and
- community calls to action on anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism.
We’re also be watching what path government lays out on COVID-19 now that we’re into the second wave and they have a majority in the legislative assembly.
We know that the pandemic is not affecting everyone in the same way and our province’s plans to mitigate future waves of COVID-19, recover economically, and create a “new normal” need to respond to this fact.
Will government take the pandemic’s gendered impacts into account and putt the people and communities who are the most vulnerable in our province at the centre of COVID-19 planning? After all, the pandemic has shown us how deeply we rely on each other to keep healthy and safe — and this means that we are only as secure as our most vulnerable.
To respond effectively, government needs to use tools and approaches like gender-based analysis and co-creation — and it needs to be transparent about how it is doing this. This will require government to engage people, organizations, and communities. It will also require government to start reckoning with social debts and deficits.
Visit our website to take a deeper look at the issues mentioned above. The Women’s Council also has a digital library on COVID-19 that offers a collection of content on the COVID-19 pandemic that considers marginalized populations, the not-for-profit sector, or uses a social justice lens.
